Nick Land and Neocameralism

I initially dismissed some of these ideas as fedora-wearing, tech-nerd fantasy. But now Nick Land seems all excited about them (I know, small beer these days). Gotta be at least worth a bit of hand wringing. If we're going to have a new aristocracy of Silicon Valley/roundabout neckbeards, then why not go full hog?

Sure, "almost entirely religious based" is still an overstatement even with the "almost" you omitted, but at the same time, you'd be hard-pressed to argue that sectarian hatred had nothing to do with European conflicts in the early modern period. Even if you choose to interpret them more as a symptom than a cause.

But I don't think we even need to go that far to explode the central argument these guys are presenting. Is he seriously saying that absolute or near-absolute monarchies are inherently less violent than democracies? Or "representative governments", if that means the same thing? Saying WWII and the Holocaust were caused by "representative governments" is ludicrous - the Nazis rose within the Reichstag by winning votes but seized absolute power in a coup and then banned all other political parties. Mussolini likewise isn't a name you readily associate with democracy, while Marxism-Leninism has always been explicitly anti-democratic.

And if wars in the 20th century have been particularly bloody in terms of absolute death toll, there are two pretty fucking obvious points here: the huge explosion of populations in Europe following the agricultural and industrial revolutions, which meant there were simply far more people available to kill and be killed than in (say) the 17th century; and the vast leaps forward in military technology. I don't think the huge death tolls attributable to the tyrannies of the 20th century can be put down to people's hatred for racial Untermenschen or class enemies being necessarily any more ferocious or unchecked than people's hatred for heretics or infidels in previous centuries.

Pitching extreme right and lining up alongside monarchists and racists is an ignominious turn in Nick Land's career. I suspect he is looking for another flock, as well as taking his ultra-libertarianism to its logical conclusion. Not only that, but he has been eclipsed by one former pupil on the Marxist left, which must be annoying.

He left Warwick at the end of the century and moved to Shanghai. There was a period of radio silence(I think, maybe not) and then he reappeared with other ex-Ccru members on the blog Hyperstition, which had some relation to the more estoteric late-Ccru scribblings. Around this time he was in touch with Reza Negarestani, of Cyclonopedia fame, who was built into the Hyperstition axis, as was K-punk. This was also the era of Cold Rationalism, but in the life-time of the Hyperstition blog, K-punk took a Leninist-Bolshevik turn, inspired by Zizek and Badiou, and Nick Land started reading National Review and Spengler and quoting (with approval) the neoconservative World War 4 thesis but (typically) in even harsher, more extreme, 'hyperstitional' terms. He since seems to have ditched the neoconservatism and absorbed libertarian writers like Hayek and Hans-Hermann Hoppe into his Deleuze & Guattari-derived pro-capitalism, and (typically) taken this in an even harsher, more extreme direction, attacking democracy with some ferocity and delving into biological determinism. He has found a theoretical space on the extreme libertarian right, building a platform alongside racists and anti-semites. There is always a danger of this when you are locked in a world of ideas.